Frankly speaking ...

I have a little experimental machine for playing with different distributions.   Lately, the  HP Mini 110-1081TU  has been running MeeGo . Now it has been commissioned to run Linux Mint . This comes in a variety of flavours. The one reviewed here is Linx Mint Debian 201109 . While the download was a monstrous 1.1G, the installation is the fastest I've ever seen. It literally took 10 minutes!  Post Installation - Wireless This is where the fun begins. First off, I had trouble getting wireless to work.  Reading dmesg gave very helpful instructions.  Read the recommendations carefully! Doing so can save you much time and effort. The HP Mini 110 uses a Broadcom 4312 WLAN . Install the packages b43-fwcutter and firmware-b43-lpphy-installer . I recommend the  Linux Wireless page as it has exceptionally good documentation. Post Installation - Sound Sound quality is actually better than under previous Linux distributions I've tried. So I ...

Zypper is the package manager used by MeeGo. And now had some time to work with the zypper package manager I can say this is a nice tool. It has good functionality, a consistent interface and is easy to use and well documented. In comparison to apt-get I'd say it is superior. That is a big admission for a long time Debian user! What won me over was when I tried unsuccessfully to upgrade from MeeGo 1.2.0 to 1.2.8, by adding the repositories. Xorg was broken. I tried to fix. But gave up so decided to revert back. I thought this would take a re-installation. But, no! I just removed the offending 1.2.8 repositories and refreshed. Zypper correctly indicated the downgrade. After some network issues, resiliently managed by zypper, I was back and running. Marvellous! So, while I only be using MeeGo on my netbook, I am now comfortable enough in its use and management to use it as an alternative to Ubuntu. The other advantage I see is professionally it is good to understand how alternate sys...

Out with the Slow I've been running Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my HP Mini 110, from 10.04 then onto Unity with 10.10, 11.04. I really like Unity. It is clean and simple and pretty for a small netbook. However, upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04 saw a distinct performance hit. Start-up was so slow. Once started it was acceptably responsive. You really needed to be patient with the slow start-up, and worse, the even slower login. Those using MS-Windows may not have noticed anything, but seasoned Linux users would. What to do? I shut-down unnecessary services. Still no noticeable improvement. This is using SSD ! How can it be so slow? Once logged in the network was available. But that was the only benefit. Time to try something new. A new chapter Good device support There are Linux choices for netbooks. You could even run a standard desktop and configure for the small form factor. That is small screen and small keyboard. After some thought, these are my requirements: Minimal setu...

Do you listen to podcasts? Do you want to manage these outside of normal web-surfing time? Do you want easy configuration? Then podracer is the software you need. Podracer was written by Lorenzo Taylor. It is a simple command line tool that has only two plain text configuration files: $HOME/.podracer/podracer.conf – configure podracer behaviour $HOME/.podracer/subscriptions – the list of subscriptions configuration This file is used to customise podracers download behaviour. With sane defaults, the only settings that I changed were, poddir – the default root location to save podcasts into And two other entries indicating where the log files are to be recorded. subscriptions Like the name suggests this a plain text file listing the podcasts you subscribe to. The format is simple: RSS feed <tab> target directory relative to poddir As this is a plain text file, where comments can be added by appending “#” to a line, it becomes a useful historical record of podcasts I ...

Family and friends depend on me to provide support for their Linux PC's. What is great is that does not require that  much support. But it does mean keeping at least one step ahead. A variety of issues are at stake: Do all applications still work?  Are the devices still supported?  Will the user interface changes be problematic?  Are there new must have features? So, while most stayed back on stable UNR 10.04 systems, I charged ahead to see if the upgrade path was safe ... Upgrading from UNR 10.04 to 10.10 introduced the Unity desktop. For the netbook form factor, this desktop is excellent. It uses limited screen space well. It can be run with minimal use of the trackpad. It looks good. It is very responsive. All the applications that are required to work, do. Devices are recognised and work. So all looks good!  But, as 10.10 was not a LTS release I recommended holding back until 11.04 came out. So I was very eager to see wh...

Ubuntu 11.04 My  previous instructions successfully worked for natty!

The remote I purchased was a Media Center Remote Control / Receiver, RC118 / IR6065A / QIR606A / Q. This being a MCE certified device I thought it would be easy to set-up. However, it took a little more effort than expected. Fortunately the steps are easy, and it was a useful problem solving exercise.  System I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with kernel 2.6.32-31-generic for use as a server for XBMC version 10.1.  I received advice from Jarod Wilson of lirc that, lirc_mceusb is obsolete. This device is already supported by the in-kernel mceusb driver. So hopefully you are much luckier than I was in setting this up! Getting the remote to work Even though dmesg reported that I had a infrared receiver, lirc failed to recognise it when testing with irw. dmesg reports: [ 23.721796] generic-usb 0003: 147A : E03E .0003: timeout initializing reports [ 23.722033] generic-usb 0003: 147A : E03E .0003: hiddev97,hidraw2: USB HID v1.00 Device [ Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transce...

It doesn't happen often (but I'd love to know why), but I lost by Xfce panel again today. Luckily this is easy to fix. Open a terminal (right mouse click) and re-start the panel with: xfce4-panel & Now that you have you're panel working make this permanent by removing current session information: rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions/ Logout and restart your session. One final hint, backup your Xfce4 settings! I alias the backup command and keep a local and remote copy of the generated archive: alias backupxfce='cd ~;tar jcvf Backups/xfce4.tar.bz2 .config/xfce4' This alias will create a  bzip2  archive.

The following guide is to assist installation of XBMC  onto an ACER Aspire Revo R3700 320G/ 2G RAM Mini PC  running Ubuntu 10.04. See also my notes on installing MCE remote for XBMC . Please feel free to suggest corrections or clarifications. Installation of Ubuntu 10.04 I installed Ubuntu 10.04 from USB. Instructions for this can be found at Ubuntu here . References https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=53812 http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Installing_XBMC_for_Linux Enable SSH Enable ssh for easy remote management. enable X11 forwarding, in /etc/ssh/sshd_config set, X11Forwarding yes enable SSH daemon with, update-rc.d ssh defaults restart SSH daemon with, service ssh restart on the server allow an X client with, xhost +[ip_of_client] To start a session with X enabled, ssh -X user@192.168.0.6 To copy a file from local to remote host use, scp local_file user user@192.168.0.6:/ho...

While Ubuntu and variants have a good package upgrade mechanism, I find that this little script can sometimes help when these fail. echo "Sources:\n" grep '^deb ' /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-get --fix-missing --list-cleanup update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get -f check sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get autoremove sudo deborphan -Pz This script has the following dependencies: deborphan sudo apt To install, use: install -p -m 755 -o root upgrade /sbin/upgrade Occasionally, run this to check for redundant packages: deborphan --guess-all -Pz And run this to clean local repository: apt-get clean One finally problem may be reported by gnupg about package authentication keys. To fix this, follow this example. I followed the example described here . I recently updated this script to include the following: sudo dpkg --configure -a This is to complete installation of unpacked but unconfigured packages.

A friend raised question a question with regard to keeping digital taxation records. Are you sure you can do that? Well, a quick search on our Government's ATO website revealed a positive answer: Electronic records Documents that you are required to keep can be in written or electronic form. If you make paper or electronic copies they must be a true and clear reproduction of the original. We recommend that if you store your records electronically you make a back-up copy to ensure the evidence is easily accessible if the original becomes inaccessible or unreadable (for example, where a hard drive is corrupted). Source: Australian Government, Australian Taxation Office, Keeping your tax records, Electronic records

I've been looking for a simple tool to annotate PDF files.   Since going paperless, I've often wanted to annotate scanned images with additional information.  Well, I finally found a tool that is light weight and simple to use.  It is flpsed .  Some advice on its use: When using "Save As", ensure this is saved with file extension ".ps" so not to get confused.   "Export" the finished annotated document as a PDF. To Do: How to use an external tags file?  I assume this is a PostScript file containing key/value pairs.